Over the past several decades, the telecommunications industry has continued to expand and experience growth spurts in technology. One of the most prevalent services provided in recent telecommunications technology is voicemail. Voicemail has continued to expand and establish itself as a key element in the successful operations of most businesses. The typical voicemail system today can take on a variety of forms, including a computer card that can operate within a personal computer connected to a businesses telephone system, or a computer card or component that is directly integrated into the businesses telephone system, or as a service provided by a telecommunications company.
Most voicemail systems today are very complex and typically are heavily reliant on software programming. The systems include many thousands of lines of code that typically execute on a single platform or computing device. The voicemail products are usually developed as the result of a great amount of effort by a highly skilled team of software programmers and hardware developers and typically, a single roll-out of a voicemail product requires many man-hours of development, testing, debugging and perfecting.
However in today's diverse society with ever expanding needs and nuances, it is difficult to develop a single business model that meets the needs of all prospective customers. Some customers may want a basic package of services from their voicemail system, and other customers may want a premium package of service from their voicemail system. Thus, developers are forced to develop products directed towards large business sectors, or attempt to deeply penetrate niche markets. Sometimes developers will launch multiple versions of a product in an attempt to capture a larger market share. This raises additional problems for the developers—mainly in the area of support. The more product variants that are sold, the more complex the companies support infrastructure must be to meet the needs of its customers.
Thus, there exists a need in the art for a telecommunications service platform that allows for monitoring a voicemail system for, among other things, billing purposes and system purposes. Furthermore, modern telephone networks and modern voicemail systems are quite complex. Thus, there exists a need to monitor the voicemail system for, among other things, alarms that might signify a system failure. The present invention provides such a solution.